Stop bidding on your own name, and four other Google Ads habits worth breaking
Most small ad accounts are not broken by bad strategy. They are broken by five ordinary habits that move money away from the searches that actually convert.
We rebuild a lot of Google Ads accounts. The overwhelming majority arrive with the same handful of habits, none of them stupid, all of them expensive. If you manage your own ads, this list is worth twenty minutes.
1. Bidding on your own business name
If someone searches your exact company name, you already rank first organically and they were always going to find you. Paying for that click buys a customer you had. There is one honest exception: a competitor is bidding on your name and appearing above you. Check the auction insights report. If nobody is, turn the brand campaign off and move the budget to a service term.
2. Leaving broad match on with no negatives
Broad match is not the enemy. Broad match with an empty negative keyword list is. Open the search terms report from the last ninety days, read every term that spent more than the price of a coffee, and add the irrelevant ones as negatives. On a typical account that has never been maintained, this single pass removes between a quarter and half of all wasted spend.
3. Sending every ad to the homepage
Someone searching for emergency boiler repair should land on the emergency boiler repair page, with the phone number visible without scrolling. The homepage asks them to navigate. Every additional step between the click and the phone call costs you a measurable share of them, and you paid for that click either way.
4. Optimising for clicks instead of calls
A campaign optimised for clicks will faithfully deliver you the cheapest possible clicks, which are usually the least valuable ones. Set up call tracking and form conversions properly, then let the campaign optimise towards those. It will spend more per click and less per customer, which is the trade you actually want.
5. Running the same budget seven days a week
Pull the day and hour report. Almost every service business has a shape to its week, and it is rarely flat. If your phone is not answered on Sunday, the Sunday budget is buying voicemail. Shift it into the hours when someone picks up.
The order to do this in
Negatives first, because that frees money immediately. Then conversion tracking, because nothing else you do can be judged without it. Then landing pages. Then scheduling. Then, and only then, worry about bid strategies, which is where most people start and where the least money is hiding.
Tomas Lindqvist
Paid Media Lead
Tomas builds and manages every paid account on the platform. He has rebuilt more than four hundred Google Ads accounts and has strong opinions about broad match.
